Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

Discussion on Zoom, 7th January 2021 – all present.

Richard, whose choice this was, had never read a Martin Amis and had wanted to for a long time. Although he’d heard the titles of many of Amis’s books – London Fields, Money, the Rachel Papers - he chose this one as he is very interested in time and books on time.

Overall opinion

Most of the BBBC were looking forward to reading this – some had read other Amis books and has been impressed with them; others had not but had wished to. And most knew that the reviews of Times’ Arrow had been ‘extravagant in their praise’. Rose Tremain said: "Time's Arrow turns the bored, banjaxed, broken-hearted old reader into a breathless, bedazzled young reader for whom the novel becomes once again a source of illumination and an act of hope." James Wood described the book as "a stunning achievement, perilous and daring". It was even nominated for the Booker prize.

But there has rarely been a BBBC book which was so disliked or by which people were so unimpressed, and there has never been a book which was so unexpectedly disliked (out of the 187 books read so far since May 2005, the only books to score lower than this book were a very bad Robert Ludlum and an equally bad Victoria Hislop! Many did not expect to like either of those and therefore were not disappointed; whereas people DID expect this to be good, so the disappointment was all the greater. For example, MarkT reported that he had been looking forward to reading another Amis, as the Rachel Papers was one of his youthful greats, and he has read it many times.)

In sum, overall opinions were that:

• it was a slight, trivial, and fundamentally boring book (R);
• arduous, gimmicky, irritating and gruelling. This was a contrived structure to challenge the writing skills of Amis rather than do anything useful for the reader. Pandering to his conceit (ChW);
• Overall, I could not find any point to this book, other than an intellectual exercise for the author (W);
• I felt I was reading a jumble of words – therefore unintelligible and irritating – a dreadful waste of paper (J);
• The main character is an uninspiring and immoral person who seems just swept along by events, including loveless childhood, a failed marriage, medical duties in concentration camps and then escape to the US and a series of jobs at a hospital and a voracious sex life and failed relationships, including with the desperate sounding Irene. Is there a point to the book part from the reversal challenge: maintaining a story and characters in reverse time order? (ChB)

One or two opinions were not so wholeheartedly negative:

• Weighty, serious themes of domestic abuse and violence, torture, murder and genocide (given an odd perspective through being reversed); and humorous at times, mostly because of the inversion of events. Overall, a brilliant idea with some great imagination and some nice sentences, but neither an easy read nor an enjoyable experience, and although there was enough to make me interested to read a novel of his not written backwards, it didn’t endear me to the author (A). 
• I like an experimental art form, one where the artist tries to push the boundaries of their art form. Like being taken on a journey without knowing where it is going. It was unsuccessful, but one should respect the attempt (S).

There were four main areas to the discussion: the topic, the reversal of time, the style and the experimental nature of the book.

1. The topic

There was again a clear consensus that “As the story of the Holocaust, concentration camps and medical experiments was well known to me and generally all readers (one would assume) there was no surprise in anything that came through the story because we knew from the outset what Amis was going to be writing about.” (ChW)

 

There are two elements here.

First, did Amis have anything new to say about the Holocaust? Again the consensus was not: 

• “Does this add to our understanding of the Holocaust or of immigrants to the US? I feel not.” (ChB) 
• “I do not feel that this book has anything to offer or to add about those awful events. I got no new perspective, no new knowledge, about the Holocaust – although some of the descriptions were very distressing, about removing “Clothes, spectacles, hair (“Freightcars full of it. Freightcar after freightcar.”), teeth” and the gold fillings, which the main character then used to live off for the rest of his life. And the awful ways that people were killed - not just the gas chambers or the vans full of exhaust fumes or the shootings - for example “Enlightenment was urged on me the day I saw the old Jew float to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life, and was hoisted out by the jubilant guards, his clothes cleansed by the mire. Then they put his beard back on.” And somehow the time-going-backwards element and the jaunty way that he wrote about this death made it even worse. And for me, there were no new perspectives on the fact that some awful characters did escape justice and lived full lives under new names – although I do know that many more escaped to South America then did to the Northern continent. ” (R)

Second, maybe it was simply the wrong topic for the book:

• “Maybe if the story had been one which had dealt with a completely unknown subject it might have been more interesting and compelling for the reader to work with the book. Instead I nearly gave up twice.” (ChW)

Again, some were (slightly) less damning:

• “Perhaps the reversal of the obscenity done to the Jews does bring it home again, ensure we respond with horror, anger and grief at what was done.” (ChB)

2. The time-flowing-backwards

A number of people liked this IDEA: 

• “great idea of a life in reverse, reverse chronology, including the narrative, dialogue and explanations” (A)

Andrew thought that the execution of the idea also created some interesting juxtapositions:

• his terrible crimes against people and his abusive treatment of Herta made almost matter of fact by being told in reverse eg. as he brings people back to life and reunites them with family
• which for me heightened the impact of the atrocities as it made me think about them more while trying to make sense of the narrative – though at the same time the author risks being highly offensive.

Although others disagreed:

• “While, the reverse actions of the death camp did have the effect of presenting the horrors in an even more horrifying way, we already know what happened there.” (W)

There were other positive things for some: although “it was not easy to read as I needed to spend time reversing the dialogue and narrative to check what is/was happening, but fascinating with every event in reverse - eg.

• shopping, having a meal, washing up,
• damaging and mending things,
• · babies being born,
• buying presents for people
• restrictions getting less and less for Jews,
• having a dump,
• performing an operation – putting on messy bloodstained scrubs and taking bloody swabs out of the bin after suturing the skin

And some of these reversals provide some amusement:” 

• “Rounding it off with a cocktail, we finish our meal and sit there doggedly describing it to the waiter, with the menus there to jog our memory.”
• “One of her duties is to replenish Hamilton’s chamber pot each morning.”
• “Something ails the ship’s engines. How they cough and choke and retch. The smoke that feeds our funnels is much too thick and black.”

And ChrisB agreed: 

“the reversal provided some funny, almost slapstick moments with reverse bodily functions, reverse medical procedures.”
And a number of people thought that there were times, using this idea, when the writing provided a pause for thought, and a deeper underlining of some important ideas, for example: 

• “On the ramp he cut a frankly glamorous figure, where he moved like a series of elegant decisions."
• “Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring.”
• “Human beings want to be alive. They are dying to be alive.”

Nevertheless, the overall consensus was that this was a gimmick, and that it did not work, certainly over the length of even a short book:

• “Why was it necessary for the book to be written backwards. In the epilogue to the book it says that Amis decided to write a book backwards and having played tennis with a friend one day who gave him a book about the “Nazi doctors“ he decided that this would be the subject of his reverse book. No explanation why he felt it was necessary to write the book backwards or what he felt it would achieve. PLUS I also felt that the details given were too shocking to be played with in this reverse manner.” (ChrisW).
• “Generally, I found the reversal of time a distraction from the story though there were lots of clever descriptions. Taking on reverse medical procedures and processes or love scenes, for example was a challenge, handled well. I am not sure it always worked consistently and there is an inherent conflict between a flowing narrative going forwards with the action going backwards. The text goes forward but we are to believe that all speech and movement were backwards.” (ChrisB) “The reverse time seemed interesting to me for the first few pages (and as I say, very occasionally that element reinforced a point in the writing), but very quickly it became nothing more than a gimmick. It was a gimmick that he tried and generally succeeded in maintaining, but one where there were huge holes in the concept – after all, people still TALKED forwards, and hence although each paragraph or event went backwards, all of the words and all of the sentences still moved forwards, and there were other holes in the concept as well. So – it is clever, in its way, but for me, completely ‘so what’. Amis has nothing to add about time to the many very interesting books, both fact and fiction, that have been written about our experience of time.” (R)

3. Style

There were some positive aspects to Amis’s style.

• “The narrator was an interesting concept – his conscience? If so surely Amis missed the opportunity for the conscience to have a more moral view on the activities of the doctor and to express these when instead all the conscience did was crack jokes and repeatedly refer to the inability to quite understand what was going on because everything was being recounted backwards.! Too long. Didn’t gain anything from this book.” (ChrisW)
• “The first few pages were interesting, but as I read on interest began to wane. There were a few cleverly constructed, quotable, descriptive sentences!” (W)

And ChrisB provided a few examples of these: “Some nice observations about relationships”:

• “I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backwards. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked – and still get no further forward.”.

“A nice description of desperation and anger”:

• “Tod’s hidden mind insists, in dream form, that Tod feels pain. The dreams tell us this in their miserable iteration. And fear. Tod is a big depositor in the bank where fear is kept. Around midnight, sometimes, Tod Friendly will create things. Wildly he will mend and heal. Taking hold of the woodwork and the webbing, with a single blow to the floor, with a single impact, he will create a kitchen chair. With one fierce and skilful kick of his aching foot he will mend a deep concavity in the refrigerator’s flank. With a butt of his head, he will heal the fissured bathroom mirror, heal also the worsening welt in his own tarnished brow, and then stand there staring at himself with his eyes flickering.”

“Observations on life”:

• “I’m being immature. I’ve got to get over it. I keep expecting the world to make sense. It doesn’t. It won’t. Ever.”  

“And suicide”:

• “But you can’t end yourself, not here. I am familiar with the idea of suicide. But once life is running, you can’t end it. You’re not at liberty to do that. We’re all here for the duration. Life will end. I know exactly how long I’ve got. It looks like for ever. I feel unique and eternal. Immortality consumes me – and me only.”

“And sexual frustration”:

• “Herta’s nightdress is childish. It is patterned with genies and sprites. I begged of them, these sprites and genies. Deliriously, all night, in bed, I begged – oh, the bedbug of nightbeg …”

And some ChrisB just liked:

• “It was November. The humans had grown their winter coats, and the high buildings trembled in the tight grip of their stress equations.”
• “Europe churned in the night like the seas of human forms round the stoves of station waiting rooms.”

Andrew thought that “Herta – sounds like hurt her” which was very apposite about the wife of this man. 

 

And even Richard, who scored the book the lowest, found some positives: “I do think that generally Amis writes well, and initially there was quite a lot to like. On page 1 I thought he made a lovely start: “I sensed their vigour, scarcely held in check, like the profusion of their body hair”. I also thought the idea of him being solely an observer of this person, who was not him, was potentially interesting. And I liked this observer’s grammatical pedantry – very like me – for example, also early on, he is taken aback by people’s lack of observance of grammatical rules: “The apostrophe in ‘Please Respect Owner’s Rights’ isn’t where it ought to be. (Nor is the one on the placard on Route 6 which locates and praises ‘Rogers’ Liquor Locker’.)” And there was some nice writing in relation to the ‘time-flowing-backwards’ gimmick – “A child’s breathless wailing calmed by the firm slap of the father’s hand, a dead ant revived by the careless press of a passing sole, a wounded finger healed and sealed by the knife’s blade”.  

 

And yet, almost everyone agreed that these positives could not outweigh the general negatives, and even the occasional humour from the reversal of time palled. As Richard put it, “by the time I had got only a few more ages in, I had written to myself “I’m getting tired of this gimmick” for example when he wrote “The little children on the street, they get littler and littler. At some point it is thought necessary to confine them to pushchairs, later to backpacks. Or they are held in the arms and quietly soothed – of course they’re sad to be going. In the very last months they cry more than ever. And they no longer smile.” And Andrew was especially scathing over Amis’s “disappointingly sloppy dog’s breakfast when Amis shows off to the reader his grasp of clinical examination”

• “Auscultation would reveal dyspnoea, rich in rales, also tachypnoea, suggesting mediastinal crunch. Eyes show strabismus and nystagmus, also arteriovenous nicking and silver-wiring. In the mouth the buccal muscosa (sic) are lesioned, the oropharynx inflamed.”

As Andrew put it, “lazy writing, full of inaccuracies and errors - and irritating”.

4. The IDEA – Experimental fiction

Andrew thought the idea of a book “narrated by a sort of conscience of the protagonist who is constantly baffled and misinterprets the reversed events and situations” was interesting, as did Willm: “The narrator being intrinsically part of while being consciously separated from the protagonist Tod was an interesting idea: I have at times found a part of myself observing what I have done and wondering why I did it”. And Steve was “struck by MarkW’s reference to Jazz – the book reminded me of Jazz – an art form that I don’t like especially, but one where I can recognise the artists’ skill, and the fact that s/he / they are trying to do something NEW. I like an experimental art form, one where the artist tries to push the boundaries of their art form. I like being taken on a journey without knowing where it is going. Therefore I liked bits – which were often amusing – for the first 20 pages!”

But again here, most felt that the book failed:

• “However, the narrator seemed to be simply a passenger, and the role was not developed, either as a ‘conscience’ or a ‘soul’ (whatever this could be)” (W).
• “It was inconsistent, with a narrator who sometimes was the observer, sometimes speaking for the man himself” (S)
• John “Felt sorry for the dedicatee – the authors sister” and “did not think this book a “valiant effort” or “interesting experiment” - more a conceit, an indulgence by a “too clever by half” author – a sad reflection on Amis as I have enjoyed some of his other work such as London Field or Night Train. Understood what the author trying to achieve but it didn’t work – therefore a failure of a book”.
• And ChrisB thought that “although the premise of a soul experiencing a person’s life backwards was intriguing, it felt at times as if the author was more concerned with the technicalities of this than the story.”

As MW put it: “I like books where one forgets that it is a book at all – here it was hard work – here the technique was ALL.”

Conclusion

So fundamentally, most found the book boring, a technical exercise, a failure - maybe a clever book, but as Richard said at the outset, a slight, trivial, and fundamentally so boring book. ChrisB asked “Really what the book is about? I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers.”

Richard Velleman

January 2021

Apeirogon – A Novel, by Colum McCann

4 June 2020, via Zoom, in compliance with current lockdown guidance, and with thanks to Camilla and Chris Born

Book choice and report - AA

1
AA chose this book because it sounded interesting and because McCann has written an excellent introduction to creative writing, Letters To A Young Writer. It turned out to interest, irritate, perplex, entertain, and affect members of the club in a countably infinite number of ways.

2
AA really enjoyed this book about grief and rage, hate and cruelty and fear, humanity and inhumanity, security and insecurity, entrenchment and co-operation - in a land where most people don’t just think inside the box but spend their entire lives inside their respective boxes. Each people with its own Catastrophe. But it’s also about love. And extraordinary hope.

It helped, particularly at the beginning, that he’d seen a documentary on Bassam and Rami. He wasn’t sure initially with the jerkiness of the writing but it began to become beautiful if spare and he loved some of the descriptions – such as Bradford, the cave Bassam lived in as a child, its demolition by Israeli soldiers, the dialogue at the airport when Bassam was flying to Bradford, the Australian artist shooting 1000 white books, and the two men’s personal thoughts about what they would like to do to Y.A. who had killed Abir.

Forty-eight years old, he moves through the dark with a slight limp, a cigarette cupped in the well of his hand. He is thin, slim, fit. His limp imprints him into the world: otherwise he might slip through almost unnoticed. Still, an agility lurks underneath, a wiry surprise, as if he might burst away from the limp at any moment and leave it abandoned behind him.

And there were some visceral descriptions – Bassam’s imprisonment, and beatings, evicted Palestinians watching their possessions destroyed and their home sealed up so no-one could ever live there again, and soldiers shooting holes in water tanks, parents stripped and searched in front of their children, and Jesus’ crucifixion.

He turned nineteen years old with two missing teeth, several fractured bones and an empty drip bag in each arm

And some humour such as the Kafkaesque exchange between Bassam and the prison governor. He increasingly found a beauty to it, a clarity and honesty and humanity, the perspective of an observer far from dispassionate but instead passionate about the two men, about looking for peace. The detail was interesting because each story was so brief.

Both chapter 500s are moving accounts of Rami and then Bassam’s loss and grief and paths towards activism, separated by chapter 1001 - a triumph of a single sentence summarising the whole story. He liked the chapters counting backwards from 500 and how it was all woven round their trip to a monastery on a single day in 2016.

He found Bassam compelling and we never find out if the grenade he threw harmed anyone. Rami was fascinating too, and we get to know his family better – Nurit and Matti. The big gap for him was Salwa, Bassam’s wife, who he didn’t feel we were allowed to meet properly. He enjoyed going back in time to meet the grandparents and their connections with the rest of the family right at the end of the book - more and more layers of perspective and complexity. Some lovely pen portraits of Smadar and Abir, but we didn’t really hear the voices of women in the book.


Overall, a novel with a countably infinite number of stories, often compelling,

and once he’d accepted that the familiar plot and narrative arc of most novels was just not going to happen, the book grew in power and beauty. It constantly made him think. Its compassion made it uplifting and left him sad no longer to be travelling with Bassam and Rami. The book’s breadth and complexity seemed appropriate to the scale of its subject matter. It didn’t feel fragmented despite all the fragments. Life’s a mess of fragments and disjointedness and he enjoyed looking through McCann’s kaleidoscope. And the rhythms of the book and the links, and the sense of connection it gave him with the intrepid duo.

3
So he decided to give it an amicable score.

4
RV lived in Israel for a few years and his brother lives there. It was a book he ought to have liked as the conflict is of great importance both to him and to the world, but he liked almost nothing about it. It was biased and not even-handed, written very much from the Palestinian point of view. He felt the book was written so that the reader learns more about, and cares more for Bassam than Rami. Although he agreed with the author’s portrayal of the oppression of the Occupation.

It had very little plot – just two fathers who had lost daughters and the two main characters were too similar. He had no affinity for them and found no interesting characters. He had no idea what the book was about. He didn’t like the jumping around of the stream-of-consciousness style and although he appreciated the links and loops and threads he didn’t see the point of these other than being clever.

He noted small factual errors, but it was the major historical errors which he found unacceptable. And the events were not placed in context. There is nothing about other Arab countries, nor of those countries’ treatment of Palestinian refugees.

5
The style was silly.

6
Particularly the single sentence chapters.

7
And the title.

8
There were, however, a few good bits such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the concentration camp, the discussions about art and music and culture, and who decides that art is art. And both chapters 500, which he felt would have been a good way to start the book. McCann did tension well. Overall, not a terrible book and he respected the hard work that went into it, but he didn’t like it.

9
MW thought the treatment of the two men by the author was even-handed, but the book was not. However, he enjoyed it because it painted a picture for him, provided one can get inside it, with its sort of stream of consciousness style. He found some of the many interwoven stories and facts distracting and a few which seemed just to be showing off. He was unclear about the symbolism of the birds and said the facts about deuterium oxide were incorrect. He liked the ending, particularly the last sentence. In summary, he enjoyed despite the unnecessary bits and feeling it was a bit long.

10
CB loved it. And has started to re-read it.

11
He’d visited the West Bank earlier this year, including a brief stay in Tel Aviv, and his sister has spent time in Israel. He didn’t feel the book was one-sided. He noted that Bassam and Rami were 20y apart in age, had very different life experiences, and that their daughters died 10y apart. McCann developed well the common feeling and purpose between the two men.

Although it took him a while to get into it, he grew to like the book more and more. Overall, he loved the book – a beautiful kaleidoscope. He found the issues well represented and liked the people. He thought all the side stories linked well. He liked the style and the neat descriptions, particularly this quote:

Rami often felt that there were nine or ten Israelis inside him, fighting. The conflicted one. The shamed one. The enamoured one. The bereaved one. The one who marvelled at the blimp’s invention. The one who knew the blimp was watching. The one watching back. The one who wanted to be watched. The anarchist. The protester. The one sick and tired of all the seeing.

He'd been struck by the calmness of the Palestinians he had met in the West Bank despite the effect of the occupation on their everyday lives.

1001
In general, it was the interwoven facts that people found unnecessary or pointless more than the interwoven stories which carried more interest, particularly if the link was not clear e.g. the volume of someone’s swimming pool in LA.

RV and JH questioned what the book was really about and what can we take away from it. CB saw it as a powerful study of bereavement, MW as a painting, and AA and CB as a kaleidoscope of life in all its messy fragmented complexity. SC noted that the book did not have a conclusion, though nor does the conflict, but appreciated that lots of good writers would not have taken on this topic. RV, MW and SC noted a stream-of-consciousness feel.

11
MT visited Israel in 1981. He remembers tension there, but Arabs and Jews living together and no stone-throwing. He didn’t finish the book, stopping at 40%, having read some lighter fiction first and coming to Apeirogon late. He liked the birds and suggested their symbolism may be related to doves and Noah. He enjoyed phrases like “hospital within a hospital”, liked the prison guard becoming Bassam’s maths teacher, Bradford, the structure of the eye, and the Talking Heads references. But he didn’t feel he got to know Bassam and Rami very well. The side stories and facts became tedious and reading the book became like homework, like a journalistic documentary.

10
And by 40% he started to hate it.

9
CW really enjoyed it. He was initially confused by the disjointed structure, but got used to it and found that all the side stories kept him alive to the main stories, with the deaths of the two girls repeatedly brought back in from different perspectives – an interesting way of keeping grief constantly at the heart of the story. He felt that the huge mutual respect between Rami and Bassam based on sharing their common grief had developed into love.

8
It was a novel, but full of facts. And that McCann was able to explain the situation without any blame so that it didn’t feel one-sided. He just presented the facts and let CW make his own judgements. He thought the birds symbolised freedom.

He loved the writing and the descriptions and wants to re-read it. Although it was quite hard to get into, he found the writing very powerful.

7
WM did not get on at all with this book.

6
This was because the style, the presentation, despite the gruesome, terrible history and events it presented, completely stultified him. He had an idea of what the author was trying to do with Apeirogon - the repetition of events, each individually countable, but seemingly going on infinitely.

However, when he’d read maybe ten accounts of the murder of the children, he really did not want any more. Also, the side issues lost him: President Mitterrand of France eating ortolan, talks with the Senator John Kerry which go on for far longer than scheduled, the tightrope walker, the countless times that the motorbike is revved - he just couldn’t get into it at all.

He noted some lovely descriptions and liked the two men, but for him this was a case of the style negating the substance. He struggled, stopping and starting, to make 50%, and then just could not face any more.

5
SC is currently on halfway – exactly, having just read chapter 1001. He is finding it a really, really interesting book. He finds the structure difficult, and the need to look for the links between the various stories hard work at times. He agreed with RV that having both chapter 500s at the start would have helped the reader get into the book, but appreciated the author’s aim of layering the different stories and viewpoints. He found this effective in some ways and very annoying in other ways. One of the Borges quotes was just stupid.

But overall, he thought McCann was really brave to write this book and it was interesting that he took it on. He noted McCann is from Dublin and that George Mitchell who was involved in the Northern Ireland peace process was later involved in the Middle East. He thought there were some interesting angles and that this was a useful engrossing addition to the narrative and literature on the topic. It is too detailed and has lots of flaws but is also honest and brave and interesting. He found quite a lot of Ulysses in this. He is enjoying it and will try and continue.

4
JH has worked in Jerusalem, Gaza and Sinai and the book brought back the complexities and depressing nature and difficulties of conflict resolution. He really struggled with it, both as a book and as a topic. It was not a novel, and bills itself as a hybrid novel, but it was problematic to call it a novel. The Twitter-like disjointed style prevented development of characters and building on the human dimension. When the author gives himself time to write, as in chapters 277 and 500, the writing is great, but the tragedy is that he doesn’t most of the time. Some great images such as the Palestinians walking over the Andes with their keys round their necks.

3
It was depressing book to read in lockdown, a gloomy book. A real struggle to read and he was glad to get to the end and see the back of it.

2
I know that it will not be over until we talk to each other

It’s a tragedy that we need to continually prove that we are human beings.

My child was not a fighter. She was not a member of Fatah or Hamas. She was sunshine. She was good weather. She told me once that she wanted to be an engineer. Can you imagine what sort of bridges she could have built?

1
Scores:
AA – 23
RV – 9/2
MW - 23
CB – 32
MT - 22
CW – 8.5
WM – 2
SC – 7 (prov)
JH – 22